Whenever the Conficker worm comes up here on OSNews (or any other site for that matter) there are always a number of people who point their fingers towards Redmond, stating that it's their fault Conifcker got out. While Microsoft has had some pretty lax responses to security threats in the past, it handled the whole Conficker thing perfectly, releasing a patch even before Conficker existed, and pushing it through Windows Update. In any case, this made me wonder about Linux distributions and security. What if a big security hole pops up in a Linux distribution - who will the Redmond-finger-pointing people hold responsible?

We're talking about a hypothetical flaw in Xorg, which runs as root. Kernel mode-setting is now a reality which means that X can be run as an extremely limited user account providing the drivers support it.

To my knowledge, most of the open-source graphics drivers have patches available that allow them to run with a limited-user Xorg. Nvidia and ATI drivers don't support this mode of operation and it's not possible for us to patch them (they are closed-source).

So, while Xorg and the developers of open-source graphics drivers would be partly to blame for not completely implementing the non-root Xorg, there would also be some blame for Nvidia and ATI as their non-compliance is holding back us back from fixing this security issue.